Tonight I got to cross something off my bucket list. I saw Elton John live.
He’s a badass and he taught me a strong business lesson:
Never stop telling awesome stories.
I’ve seen tons of shows from many artist around his era: Paul McCartney, Clapton, Eagles, Stones, etc. But none of them told stories like Elton. In fact, just think about his famous songs: Candle in the Wind, Daniel,...

Tonight was the first ever B2BCamp weekday event. It was a lot more condensed than a standard Camp but full of fun, connecting and knowledge sharing.
The speaker lineup was phenomenal and the content super helpful. Here are my big three takeaways:
In a perfect world, we’d never go through sales professionals to buy stuff. It’s important to understand the reasons why and to engineer le...

I’ve been riding MARTA to the office a lot lately and have been filling the time by listening to popular presentations.
Yesterday morning I caught the video below. It’s by one of the best in the game, Gary Vaynerchuk. Gary has a line in here that I absolutely love. He pleads the audience to promise they won’t do shit they hate in life.
There’s just too much opportunity in t...

When I was a kid I got all my technology knowledge from my dad. I’ll never forget the image of him setting up our first Windows PC wearing a santa hat as I snuck downstairs to spy on Christmas night.
But those times have changed. Now I’m the technology bell-weather of the family.
Except for tonight. I was chatting with my dad earlier and he shared a story I missed today.
Moral of the s...

I’ve been focused a lot on event marketing this week. With the launch of the first ATL inside sales meetup, the continual success of ASV and the upcoming B2BCamp “un”meetup, I’ve been schooling myself in the art of the event.
Here are three core elements that I’ve learned are paramount to a solid event:
1. A team you can rely on.
Events have a lot of moving components...

We hosted an inside sales meetup today at the ATL Tech Village.
We had a solid speaker who focused on the concepts of social selling. One of the coolest parts of her presentation was a video she showed at the beginning of her talk. It made a major impact on the audience.
I know because I talked to over 10 people after the show that said this video rocked. And it opened their eyes.
I’ve got t...

As a startup founder, you should find live opportunities to present to your ideal prospects often. One idea is to have a particular slide-deck that you can use many times over.
Now, it wont always be relevant for you to use the same deck but if you’re picking the right events, it could be more than 50% of the time you can recycle.
This dawned on me today when I gave a presentation on 6 free...

Jason Lemkin claims to know the #1 metric that matters the most to SaaS businesses.
He says it’s not revenue growth or churn or LTV but ORGANIC INBOUND LEADS.
Yeah, that’s right. The founder of wildly successful Echosign, bought by Adobe is claiming that the rate at which qualified people submit their information to you is the most important metric for your SaaS business.
The concept i...

The key to great content marketing is that it provides significant value to your target audience. Over the last year I’ve been learning from the business community on what content works and what doesn’t. I’ve got some definite favorites.
Here are 7:
Hubspot & Rigor’s Diagnostic Tools – These tools help provide a taste of immediate value to site visitors. They...

One of my favorite resources for self improvement is Lynda.com.
It’s a subscription website where you watch topical improvement videos.
It’s where I learned Illustrator and Photoshop and a place I’ve gone to soak up knowledge on video production.
I really feel like effective content marketing requires some lightweight design skills (see Matthew Wesson of Pardot’s work). In...